And now, after making love to Doris, he feels the hard, metallic bubble once again, still located low in his belly, but expanding toward
his chest and groin now and rapidly growing heavier. He suddenly feels frightened, but he doesn’t know where to aim his fear—and that only makes him more frightened. What if he has cancer? He’s panicking. Jesus H. Christ, what’s wrong? He’s pulling his clothes back on, slowly, carefully, as if nothing’s wrong or unusual, but he’s thinking in a wind: My God, I’m going to blow up, my life’s all wrong, everything’s all wrong, I didn’t mean for things to turn out like this, what the fuck’s going on?
Bob Dubois does not know what is going on, because, on this snowy night in December in a dark, shabby apartment over a bar on Depot Street, as he draws his clothes back on, he does not know that his life’s story is beginning. A man rarely, if ever, knows at the time that his life’s story, its one story, is beginning, especially a man like Bob Dubois. Until this night, except for the four years he served in the air force, Bob has lived all his life in Catamount and since high school has worked for the same company, Abenaki Oil Company on North Main Street, at the same trade, repairing oil burners. He is thirty years old, “happily married,” with two children, daughters, aged six and four. Both his parents are dead, and his older brother, Eddie, owns a liquor store in Oleander Park, Florida. His wife Elaine loves and admires him, his daughters Ruthie and Emma practically worship him, his boss, Fred Turner, says he needs him, and his friends think he has a good sense of humor. He is a frugal man. He owns a run-down seventy-five-year-old duplex in a working-class neighborhood on the north end of Butterick Street, lives with his family in the front half and rents out the back to four young people he calls hippies. He owns a boat, a thirteen-foot Boston whaler he built from a kit, with a sixteen-horsepower Mercury outboard motor; the boat he keeps shrouded in clear plastic in his side yard from November until the ice in the lakes breaks up; the motor’s in the basement. He owns a battered green 1974 Chevrolet station wagon with a tricky transmission. He owes the Catamount Savings and Loan Company—for the house, boat and car—a little over $22,000. He pays cash for everything else. He votes Democratic, as his father did, goes occasionally
to mass with his wife and children and believes in God the way he believes in politicians—he knows He exists but doesn’t depend on Him for anything. He loves his wife and children. He has a girlfriend. He hates his life.
Because there’s nothing dramatically or even apparently wrong with his life (many men would envy it), and because Bob Dubois was raised as most poor children are raised (to keep a wary eye on those less fortunate than he, rather than to gaze hungrily in the opposite direction), he is not inclined to complain about his life. In fact, what he hates about his life is precisely what he usually points to with pride: he has a steady job, he owns his own house, he has a happy, healthy family, and so on.
The trouble with his life, if he were to say it honestly, which at this moment in his life he cannot, is that it’s over. He’s alive, but his life has died. He’s thirty years old, and if for the next thirty-five years he works as hard as he has so far, he will be able to stay exactly where he is now, materially, personally. He’ll be able to hold on to what he’s got. Yet everything he sees in store windows or on TV, everything he reads in magazines and newspapers, and everyone he knows—his boss, Fred Turner, his friends at the shop, his wife and children, even his brother Eddie—tells him that he has a future, that his life is not over, for there’s still a hell of a lot more of everything out there and it’s just waiting for the taking, and a guy like Bob Dubois, steady, smart, skilled, good-looking and with a sharp sense of humor too—all a guy like that has to do is reach up and grab it. It’s the old life-as-ladder metaphor, and everyone in America seems to believe in it. Bob has survived in a world where mere survival is insufficient, so if he complains about its insufficiency, he’s told to look below him, see how far he’s come already, see how far he’s standing above those still at the bottom of the ladder, and if he says, All right, then, fine, I’ll just hold
on to what I’ve got, he’ll be told, Don’t be stupid, Bob, look above you—a new car, a summer house down on the Maine coast where you can fish to your heart’s content, early retirement, Bob, college-educated children, and someday you’ll own your own business too, and your wife can look like Lauren Bacall in mink, and you can pick up your girlfriend in Aix-en-Provence in your Lancia, improve your memory, Bob, eliminate baldness, amaze your friends and family.
He stands in front of the Sears, Roebuck store, seeming to study the children’s clothes worn by the mannequins, but actually he’s thinking about his penis and testicles. The children in the window, schoolchildren, are blond and clear-faced, happy and chic, all good students with bookbags and briefcases, dressed in crew-neck sweaters and corduroy pants, wool wraparound skirts and nylon tights. They’re happy.
Snow is falling onto Bob Dubois’s cap and shoulders, his hands are in his pants pockets, and he is taking care not to touch his genitals, because they feel large and sensitive to him and have driven away the feeling of that hard, heavy bubble, and he is afraid that if he touches his penis and testicles, they will suddenly feel small and merely functional, and that hard, pressing, stone-heavy bubble will come again. He jiggles his change and keys, reminds himself almost forcibly that he must buy ice skates for Ruthie and enters the store.
The sporting goods department is downstairs in the basement, with appliances and tools. Surprised, Bob finds that he is the only customer on the floor. A portly, red-faced salesman with dark, slicked-back hair and wearing a white shirt and a loud yellow tie crosses from the skis and says, “We’re closing.” Then, when Bob seems not to have heard him, he asks in a quiet voice, “Can I help you?”
Bob hesitates a second, looks slowly around at the hockey sticks, pucks, pads and skates, as if he has stumbled into ladies’ lingerie, and mumbles, “I don’t know … I’m looking for something for my daughter … she’s only a kid, she’s only six….”
The salesman folds his arms across his chest. “It’s nine-oh-five. We’re closing.”
“Do they still make those old Eddie Bauer skates with the wooden toes? You know the kind I mean? With the tendon guards?”
“Not for small children, no. And not for girls. Look, maybe you can do this tomorrow; we’re open all day tomorrow,” the salesman says, and makes a half turn toward the skis.
“I played defense, you know. In high school, I played for Bishop Grenier, me and my brother Eddie.”
“I’m from Dover,” the salesman says, reminded, no doubt, that he’s got to drive twenty-eight miles in a snowstorm to get home to a stiff drink and stockinged feet on a hassock and the TV on. “Look, mister, we’re closed. If you know what you want, and we got it out here on the floor, I can ring it up for you, but you gotta be quick, okay?”
“Yeah, right,” Bob says. “I’m sorry. Skates, I’m looking for skates for my daughter.” He squints and looks around him at the counters and displays, as if trying to think of a word. “Figure skates.”
“Size?”
In his right front pocket, Bob’s hand, as if with a will of its own, reaches down and forward and cups his crotch, and what he feared would be true is in fact true—his penis is small, ordinary, a minor organ that urinates day and night and now and then ejaculates, and his belly feels full of slag again. “She’s only a little kid. It’s her first skates,” he says.
Reaching forward, the salesman places one hand on Bob’s shoulder. “You’ll have to do this tomorrow,” he says firmly.
Bob wrenches his shoulder away from the man’s hand, but the man ignores the gesture and simply walks off. “Hey!” Bob calls. “Hey, pal! You know what?”
The man stops and turns warily back.
“You know what? I don’t
want
your damn Sears and Roebuck ice skates! Your twenty-dollar specials! I want something
better
than that! Custom-made, maybe.”
“We’re closed,” the man says in a low voice.
“Better. I want something
better
.”
“I’m sorry,” the man says, and again he turns away.
Bob looks at the bald spot on the back of the man’s head. Bald as a baby’s behind, he thinks, and suddenly he remembers deciding never to strike his wife and children, remembers it as if it were a precise fall of light or an odor, when instead it was a complex, clearly defined event that occurred one Sunday afternoon two summers ago, when he and Elaine took Ruthie and Emma out fishing on Lake Sunapee.
Bob had pictured the day differently: a family outing in which Dad teaches the older child to fish; he catches a half-dozen small-mouth bass and she catches a perch or sunfish and is excited and grateful; Mom looks on proudly; Baby coos and plays with her fat fingers. But instead, the bass weren’t biting and the mosquitoes were, Ruthie thought fishing was a pointless activity and Elaine had to struggle to keep Emma, barely two that summer and downright annoyed with the project, from falling out of the boat. Though the sun was hot and the lake windless and still, they’d all dressed as if for a cool, breezy day on the water. By ten o’clock in the morning, after less than a half hour of it, they were sweating and wrinkled inside long-sleeved shirts, trousers, caps and jackets. First Bob and then Ruthie stripped to their tee shirts and jeans. A little later, Elaine pulled off her jacket and jersey and sat in the stern in bra and Bermuda shorts, and keeping an eye out for passersby, took off all Emma’s clothing.
Finally, Bob gave up trying to fish, and to everyone’s relief, started to pack his gear in. He raised anchor and after five or six tries, got the motor started and headed the boat toward shore. All the way in, he sat in the stern and studied his family, their bodies: Ruthie’s stalk-like neck and large, dark, blossomy head, her narrow back and arms like twigs, her knobby knees, hard legs and long, bony feet—the body of a thoroughbred filly, it seemed to him, long and awkward now, a little brittle, but filled with promise of beauty, grace and power; and Emma’s cherubic pink roundness, her smooth lumps of flesh, all spheres, moons and fruit, and creases where they joined, and her hair, blond and silky, laid over her crown in thin, spiraling loops—to Bob, she had the nearly shapeless, compressed body of a
puppy, foolishly good-natured, utterly unconscious of its fragility; and Elaine’s short, compact body, her muscular arms and freckled shoulders, her breasts, firm and, for a small woman, large and succulent-looking, her straight back and flat belly, her sturdy, lightly haired legs—Bob thought of the burro that carried Jesus into Jerusalem, a white one, large-eyed and sweet-tempered, diligent, patient, hardy and humble, but pretty too, a slightly glamorous version of an anciently rudimentary type.
All the way in to shore, Ruthie, seated forward near the bow, looked impatiently toward land, as the pine and spruce trees grew larger and more detailed and familiar, while Emma, her naked ass in the air, scrambled about on the flat bottom of the boat, and Elaine, eyes jammed shut, shoved her face, shoulders and chest toward the glow of the sun, until finally the boat scraped the gravelly bottom, and Ruthie jumped out and drew the bow onto land. Elaine scooped up Emma and stepped gingerly to shore and set the naked child on the grass.
Suddenly alone, Bob sat in the stern of the boat, and for an instant he saw these three female bodies in all their transience and fragility, their awful availability to pain and destruction. He was terrified for them, and he swore to himself that he would never strike their bodies, that he would never raise his stony male bulk and iron-hard strength against them. Then, at the same instant, he felt bubbling from deep within his chest a dark hatred for the very vulnerability he was swearing never to offend. He despised it.
Bob studies the bald spot on the back of the salesman’s head. There’s tissue, thin, pink skin, then eggshell bone, then fleshy brain, he thinks. And that’s it. That’s all there is between everything and nothing. “I’m sorry,” he says in a low voice. “Hey, really, I’m sorry, pal. There’s nothing wrong with Sears, you understand. Nothing. I like Sears. Shop here all the time. It’s just … it’s just that …”
The salesman has disappeared behind a tepee of skis stacked on their ends and has started to close out his register.
Bob’s face twists on its axis, a big, square-faced man writhing on
the pole of his own pain. He lets his hands flop uselessly at his sides. “I want … I want … I want …” This isn’t going right; everything’s coming out wrong. He’s supposed to be talking nicely to this salesman, conning him, getting a good buy, a floor model with scuffs selling for wholesale, the way Eddie always gets things for his kid, one-third off and just as good as new, better, even, because new costs too much. Why can’t he make this salesman
like
him?
From beyond the skis, the man calls, “They’re locking the doors now!”
Bob says nothing, just stands there as if he were a mannequin.
The salesman peeks around the skis and sees Bob hasn’t left yet. “Come back tomorrow if you want skates!” he shouts, as if he thinks Bob is hard of hearing or maybe simple-minded.
“Tomorrow?” Slowly Bob’s face breaks into a grin, and he laughs, once. “Hah! Tomorrow, It’ll be the same tomorrow,” he says. Still grinning, he takes a step forward, as if to explain. “What I want is …”
“Look, you better get outa here or I’ll hafta call the manager.”
Bob stops, and quietly, somberly, he says, “I’m sorry. I just … I’m sorry.” Turning, he slowly walks away, plods past the copper-toned refrigerators and stoves, the pastel-colored washers and dryers, and up the stairs to street level. A janitor jangling a huge ring of keys lets him out to the sidewalk, where it’s snowing heavily. No one else is on the sidewalks, though cars occasionally pass sloppily by on Main Street. Jamming his hands into his jacket pockets, Bob lowers his head against the flying snow and quickly walks the two blocks to his car on Depot Street.
He stands on the slippery sidewalk next to his station wagon, now a long white mound, and stares at the bar across the street, studies the small red neon sign flashing Irwin’s name at him like a beacon through the falling snow, then gazes up at the darkened blank windows of Doris’s apartment. His bear-like head droops, and glancing at the salt-covered pickup truck, cold and empty, still parked in front of his car, as if deserted in an old war, he looks down Depot Street
toward the cannery and the river, and then back up Depot Street to Main. This is his whole world. He knows every square inch of its surface. For a second he studies the candy canes dangling from the lampposts, when all of a sudden, without a thought of it, he doubles up his right fist and holds it out in front of him, as if he were holding a hammer, or as if it were a hammer itself. His left hand remains in his jacket pocket, relaxed and warm, but his right hand is a fist raised against and extended toward the night, and he brings it heel-first swiftly down, smashing it against the windshield on the passenger’s side. The blow shatters the outer layer of glass and sends silvery cobwebs across the windshield, the force of the blow spraying the snow in fantails, clearing the windshield instantly. Again, he brings the heel of his fist down, and again, until he has filled the windshield entirely with spiderwebs of broken glass. Then he attacks the side windows, and the snow shudders and falls like a heavy curtain to the street. First he hits the front window on the passenger’s side, then the back, then the rear window, until he has worked his way around to the other side of the station wagon, where he makes his way forward to the driver’s window, pounding as he goes, as if trying to free a child trapped inside.